Microsoft, through the voice of one of its lawyers, has claimed that the open source community and particularly the Linux OS and the OpenOffice software are violating no less than 235 Microsoft patents.

During an interview with Fortune magazine, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, and Horacio Gutierrez, the company's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, have claimed that the open source community is now illegally using Redmond-crafted patents, and that in order to avoid legal troubles the open source software (OSS) community should start paying royalties.

In order to emphasize the dimension of the damage produced by the OSS to Microsoft, Gutierrez said that "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement. ...There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

More specifically, Microsoft decries the fact that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, while the Linux user interface (I’m just curious: is it the XGL or the line-mode?...) and other design elements infringe on a further 65.

OpenOffice is guilty of infringing 45 MS patents, while a suite of other open source programs were found to illegally include a bulk of 85 patents belonging to the Redmond behemoth.

Large companies which support, deploy and contribute to the development of the Linux OS, like IBM, Wal-Mart or Goldman-Sachs, will be forced to pay royalties to Microsoft, if the giant’s scheme is validated in court. Many analysts say such outcome (in favor of Microsoft) will seriously undermine the future development of the free software.

Microsoft defends its policy by stating that the rules apply to everyone in the business. We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," he insists. "What's fair is fair."

However, according to in an e-mail received by Computerworld late Sunday night, a Microsoft spokesman said the company was motivated to speak over concerns that the latest draft of the General Public License version 3, which governs distribution and use of Linux and many other open-source software, "attempts to tear down the bridge between proprietary and open source technology that Microsoft has worked to build with the industry and customers."

"The Free Software Foundation’s efforts with GPLv3 while not harming existing contracts can harm the desired interoperability and open exchange that we have increasingly seen between proprietary and open source over the past several years," he wrote.